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OTTAWA— Justin Trudeau is putting out his life story to Canadians, he says, to show that the coming election will be a stark choice between his own optimism and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “negativity.”

The Liberal leader’s new book, Common Ground, hits the shelves this weekend, in what he says is an attempt to frame his own approach to politics in polar opposition to Harper and the Conservatives.

“This book is about two contrasting visions of Canada. One exemplified by the current government, that is narrower and more negative. And one exemplified by my vision — the Liberal vision of this country — which is one founded on diversity, and openness, and compassion, and opportunity,” Trudeau said in an interview with the Star.

Those hoping for shocking personal revelations will be disappointed, though Trudeau does offer some new glimpses of what it was like to grow up as the eldest child of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, especially as their marriage crumbled in full public view in the 1970s.

He writes of rebelling against his often-aloof, intellectual father by reading fiction and of having to comfort his mother in the midst of a messy breakup with her boyfriend when he was just 11 years old.

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Because his mother has been so open about her struggles with mental illness, he says, it was easier to write about some of the tougher times in their family.

Trudeau says that his own wife, Sophie, was far more cautious, however, about this book project.

“That was a bit of a challenge at certain points because she feels very strongly that it’s important to protect our personal life from the public life that we also lead. She is less comfortable with that than I am,” he said. In the book, Trudeau writes of their marriage as one with “ups and downs,” but a strong and honest one nonetheless.

Some of Trudeau’s recollections are tinged with regret. A major one was not staying in close enough touch with his brother, Michel, in the years before his 1998 death in a B.C. avalanche.

“That I didn’t spend more time with him is one of my real and genuine deep regrets in life,” he said.

Trudeau also admits that he has not had the relationship he should have had with his half-sister, Sarah Coyne, born in 1991 to then-constitutional-adviser Deborah Coyne and Pierre Trudeau. (Coyne ran against Trudeau during the 2012 leadership race.)

But he has connected with Sarah in the process of writing the book.

“We’ve chatted. She happened to visit the house, and so met Sophie and the kids. She has a very different life from us,” he said. “But yeah, there is now a connection there that there hadn’t been before.”

Justin Trudeau writes self-deprecatingly about his awkward teens, complete with eccentric fashion choices that made him anything but popular with young women. That awkwardness still sticks with him to this day, he writes. (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Trudeau writes self-deprecatingly about his awkward teens, complete with tales of severe acne and eccentric fashion choices that made him anything but popular with young women. That awkwardness still sticks with him to this day, he writes, to the point that he believes people are just being “polite” when they comment on his looks.

“That’s fairly universal. When people go through difficult awkward ages in those formative years, it echoes. How we were as teenagers is often very much shaping how we are through the rest of our lives,” Trudeau told the Star.

He says he’s aware that some of his opponents may seize on such teen-aged confessions to use against him.

“If we wander around as politicians jumping at every shadow and desperately afraid of having our words taken out of context or attacks layered on in an unfair way, I think we’re actually doing a disrespect to Canadians, to people’s intelligence,” he says. “The people I met across this county, in every corner of this country, are decent, well-meaning, open-hearted, compassionate people. Canadians are nice and polite. It’s not just a stereotype.”

There is no mention in the book of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, though Trudeau does write of how he and his advisers seriously considered the question of Liberal-NDP merger when he was deciding whether to run for the Liberal leadership. Trudeau does write approvingly of Mulcair’s predecessor, Jack Layton, saying “Canadian public life still misses” the late NDP leader.

Trudeau is releasing this book in the wake of a couple of shaky weeks in his leadership, in which he came under widespread criticism for off-the-cuff remarks and muddled statements on Canada’s response to the Islamic State.

He admits in the book that while he likes journalists, he’s had a lot to learn about message discipline in his encounters with reporters — that dealings between the politicians and the media are not as free-wheeling as they were when his father was in power.

In the interview, Trudeau said the current tone of relations concerns him. “What worries me is, in journalism as in politics these days, there tends to be a lot of people choosing the easy route — choosing to shock and get reactions on a very surface level rather than engaging in a thoughtful approach.”

But Trudeau also hints in the book that if he does become prime minister, he’d be more like his father and less like Harper when it comes to media relations. “There is little place for my father’s scrum style in today’s Ottawa. For now, at least.”

Trudeau’s Liberals have adopted the motto “hope and hard work” to take them into the next election and that phrase is sprinkled throughout his book. But while the text dwells a lot on the “hope” part of that equation, it isn’t all that revealing about hard policy work or a future platform — making Common Ground more of a memoir than a manifesto.

“The policies that will bring us closer to these objectives have been taking shape, and will continue to evolve as we approach the next election,” Trudeau writes.

The actual writing of the book was a group effort. Trudeau sat down with various interviewers (including the National Post’s Jonathan Kay), and then the taped recollections were sorted by editors and advisers. Once all the stories were woven together, Trudeau himself grabbed “stolen hours” on weekends or at the end of workdays to put the manuscript into his own voice.

“I sat down and told as many stories as I could remember of different parts of my life. I dictated big sections of the book without really worrying about what fit where or what I might want to cut out or embellish on later and add to,” he explained. “From having told all the stories, it was then condensed by an editor into a bit of a story arc that had the different chapters and different sections. And then, I sat down chapter by chapter with what I’d said . . . and edited it, and rewrote it,” he said.

Trudeau on wedge politics, the PM and Princess Diana

On how he sees politics differently from Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Mr. Harper presents a very appealing path to political power. If you pick and choose clearly enough the people you want to stand against, if you draw in and discipline an unruly team as strongly as you can, if you present a singular point of authority at the top of a political party, that’s a path to power, it’s even a path to a majority. It certainly worked for Mr. Harper . . . . I disagree with the premise of that. I disagree with the idea that, in order to succeed in Canada, you have to pick which Canadians you want to represent and allow the others to be represented by others. . . .

On what he learned about himself while working on the biography:

I learned I love writing a book. I really enjoyed this process. Not so much because it was sharing stories, but because of the crafting of a finished project.

On what it was like to meet people such as former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Princess Diana in his childhood:

“. . . The amount of attention and importance they had was significant, but ultimately, they were people with good moods and bad moods, good days and bad days.”

On “wedge politics” and electoral strategies:

“A very powerful mechanism to get elected is to play on anger and pick those wedge issues. You only have to glance quickly at the polls to see there are an awful lot of people out there angry about the direction this current government is going in. One could absolutely draw on that as an election tactic to great effect. . . . (But) we will not look for the segments that will best respond to us and ignore those people who would never respond to us. Because you can’t actually govern a country once you’ve done that. You can get elected, but you can’t bring people together. And the central thesis of this book is that we have to start looking at our common ground.”

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